Saturday 12 January, 2008

Gameplay

As I got into the rhythm of receiving the instructions "Go here and talk to X," doing what I was told, rinsing and repeating, I almost looked forward to completing the tasks set before me, if only so I could get through this game and get it over with.

As much as I wanted to get into the story, I found myself caring more about the minigames than I did about the nuggets of plot advancement I was alotted in between sessions of timwasting waiting for NPCs to spawn or open shop.

The few actual action scenes I got to play through were short, remedial, and left me feeling completely disconnected from the, albeit occasionally awesome, kung-fu the main character executes.

Design

The central flaw is that this is a story driven, character based game with a boring, slow, story and flat, uninteresting characters, a fact not helped by their ridiculous voice over acting, terrible script, and often creepy graphical rendering. Shenmue does it's best to make the player feel immersed in a real life city where they have free roam, but if they actually look around, they'll realize that the world is as linear as the story they're torturously muddling through. Any sense of exploration, which itself is quickly followed by a sense of being lost and frustrated, is quickly killed as soon as the player learns where the dozen or so shops they're allowed to enter are located, and attempts to move on to a different part of the city are met with invisible walls and the main character reciting "I should look for more clues here first."

The "interactive" cutscenes amount to little more than button mashing, and are over too quickly to hold the player's attention. When not in cutscene mode, movement controls are cumbersome and clumsy, and the fighting techniques are too complex to execute with any sort of strategy.

I suppose it should be noted that the limited openness the game does allow was somewhat ahead of its time--things like a day/night cycle and NPC routines independent of the player. It's fortunate that games with better core-mechanics of gamepay would later adopt these features.

Majoras Mask for the N64 was a good example of a game where the NPC routines are carried out independent of the player unless the player interferes, except that game also managed to simultaneously not suck.

This is well done, and what we are looking for in future gamelog assignments.

~Sheena Marquez (TA)

I really enjoyed Shenmue. Granted, I did play it back when it was released, but I think I would still like it now. What I liked most about it was the leisurely pace it had. Most games seem to have this sense of impending doom that forces you to get stuff done now, but Shenmue was rather refreshing in that sense. I guess that openworld (or sandbox) games have evolved a lot since (GTAIII and Bully being to great examples) but Shenmue does have a very different flavour to it.